Understanding Ourselves
What is Truth?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
Can belief help create the reality it predicts? Drawing on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug moves from bank runs and sham surgeries to the nocebo effect, in which an expectation of illness can produce symptoms. A 1999 Coca-Cola illness scare among Belgian schoolchildren becomes the troubling case study — one in which contamination, expectation, and mass reaction proved difficult to disentangle.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
Some things are true whether you believe in them or not. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. Smoking kills. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
Other things have the potential to be true, if we believe in them. Our belief becomes what sociologists dub a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you predict a bank will go bust and than convinces lots of people to close their accounts, then, sure enough, the bank will go bust.
Or, take the placebo effect. If your doctor gives you a fake pill and says it will cure what ails you, chances are you will feel better. The more dynamic the placebo , the bigger the chance. Injection, on the whole, is more effective than pills, and in the old days even bloodletting would do the trick—not because medieval medicine was so advanced, but because people thought a procedure that drastic was bound to have an impact.
And the ultimate placebo? Surgery! Don a white coat, administer an anaesthetic, and then kick back and pour yourself a cup of coffee. When the patient revives tell them the operation was a success. A broad review carried out by the British Medical Journal comparing actual surgical procedures with sham surgery (for conditions like back pain and heartburn) revealed that placebos also helped in three-quarters of all cases, and in half were just as effective as the real thing.
But it also works the other way around.
Take a fake pill thinking it will make you sick, and chances are, it will. Warn your patients a drug has serious side effects, and it probably will. For obvious reasons, the nocebo effect, as it’s called, hasn’t been widely tested, given the touch ethics of convincing healthy people that they are ill. Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests that nocebos can be quite powerful.
That’s also what Belgian health officials concluded in the summer of 1999. Possibly there really was something wrong with one or two of the cokes those kids in Bornem drank. Who’s to say? But beyond that, the scientists were unequivocal: the hundreds of other children had been infected with a ‘mass psychogenic illness’. In plain English: they imagined it.
Which is not to say the victims were pretending. More than a thousand Belgian kids were genuinely nauseated, feverish, and dizzy. If you believe something enough, it can become real. If there’s one lesson that can be drawn from the nocebo effect, is that ideas are never merely ideas. We are what we believe. We find whaat we go looking forward. And what we predict, comes to pass.
Maybe you see where I’m going with this: our grim view of humanity is also a nocebo.
If we believe most people can’t be trusted, that’s how we’ll treat each other, to everyone’s detriment. Few ideas have as much power to shape the world as our view of other people. Because ultimately, you get what you expect to get. If we want to tackle the greatest challenges of our times—from the climate crisis to our growing distrust of each other-then the place we need to start is human nature.
To be clear: this book is not a sermon on the fundamental goodness of people. Obviously, we’re not angels. We’re complex creatures, with a good side and a not-so-good side. The question is to which side do we turn to.
My argument is simply this: that we-by-nature as children, on an uninhabited island, when war breaks out, when crisis hits—have a powerful preference for our good side. I will present the considerable scientific showing just how realistic a more positive view of human nature is. At the same time, it could be more of a reality if we’d start to believe it.
The author present a parable of unknown origin that he believes contains a profound truth. Here the same parable is presented, which is of known origin. This parable has been presented in previous healthymemory posts:
One evening an Old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. “ The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”